[Scenario Seed] The Bell Mystery

[Catsmate]

The Bell Mystery

    While 'Die Glocke' and some of the related material appeared in the EU novel The Crawling Terror this is a different,     more general take on the device.

The mystery of "The Bell" or more usually "Die Glocke¹" began in the decaying runs of the Nazi ‘Thousand Year Reich’, a secret weapon or device utilising advanced scientific principles, or recovered alien technology, that would have won the war for Germany. If it had worked.
After the war, depending on who tells the story, it was abandoned in a secret base in Poland (or Silesia), captured by the NKVD and taken to the Soviet Union, used as a bargaining chip by an SS officer facing war crimes charges, hidden in the Nazo redoubts in Agrentina or Neuschwabenland, or disappeared into infinity.

The projected allegedly started in the November 1943 with one of those small, semi-independent, research institutes the Nazis were so fond of, part of the Reich Research Council.
In a laboratory under Gandau airfield in Breslau (now Wroclaw in Poland, then in German Silesia) work started on the construction of a strange experimental device, whose distinctive shape quickly gained it the nickname of ‘the Bell. No-one is quite sure what it was made of, though the material is describes as a ‘hard, heavy metal.

• The airfield was conveniently adjacent to a Junkers production facility with access to engineering resources and slave labour, and far from Allied bombing raids.
  

The Bell stood around five metres high and was about three metres in diameter. The interior had two cylinders containing  a mysterious substance (referred to as 'Xerum 525') which emitted a strange purple glow.

• Perhaps a form of Cherenkov radiation due to it emitting particles moving faster than the local speed of light? Which such radiation is stereotypically blue, most is actually higher in frequency.

This substance was stored in thick lead containers when the Bell was not in use. Another strange material, referred to as ‘light metal’ (not the usual aluminium) was also part of the Bell.
In operation the cylinders rotated in a framework inside the Bell, accompanied by the usual humming noise, did something, while consuming vast amounts of electrical energy.
It also emitted dangerous radiations, interfering with electrical equipment and human brains, several hundred metres away. Living tissue introduced into the Bell died in strange ways; reduced to a black gelatinous material, reduced to a brittle white-bleached form or disintegrated into powder.
Operators wore specially developed suits with a conductive mesh sandwiched between layers of rubber and helmets whose visors were treated and tinted red.

In July 1944 work, and the Bell, moved to a laboratory at Leubus in Silesia (now Lubiaz in Poland) for reasons unknown, and then to the Riese complex later that year. There research was headed up by the Nobel Laureate Walther Gerlach.

• The Riese complex was a series of huge underground facilities encompassing thousands of cubic metres of tunnels and bunkers. The perfect place for secret Nazi projects.
  

In 1945 Gruppenführer Jakob Sporrenberg enters the picture along with Obergruppenführer Hans Kammler . The former was in charge of policing in occupied Norway while Kammer was in charge of "special construction tasks" for Albert Speer and was also involved in V-2 operations.

• Kammler was responsible for one of the odder Nazi atrocities, the Arnsberg Forest Massacre in March 1945 where V-2 personnel killed over two hundred people who’d been working on the project, supposedly because Kammler’s car was delayed.

Not long after that Kammler and several subordinates (up to six hundred in some accounts, certainly more than twenty) disappear from history. Despite intense searches for him after the war ended (he made 'List 13' of wanted war criminals) Kammler, his body or definitive evidence of his death or survival has never been found.


The problem with the above account is that it’s almost certainly complete rubbish². The only source for most of it is an odd Polish journalist and author Igor Witkowski who wrote a book about Nazi advanced weaponry and the even more dubious UFOlogist Nick Cook. Witkowski has never allowed independent examination of his supposed 'papers' or other primary sources.
But let’s not let that stop us using the Bell.


So what was the Glocke? Where did it comes from? Where did it go?
Given that it didn’t actually exist no-one knows. But speculation links it to everything from zero-point energy, scalar energy fields, anti-gravity to fissile material production. But there is one fascinating, and relevant, possibility: Projekt Chronos. Time travel.

Supposedly the Bell could generate temporal distortions, altering the flow of time in its vicinity³. It may have utilised recovered alien technology (perhaps the Kontron crystals brought to Earth by the Borad⁴ or the same UFO crash in 1935 that gave the Nazis a time lost ship⁵. Or perhaps a damaged War Lord SIDRAT left over from the War Games and missed by the Time Lord cleanup.

Now Nazi time travellers has potential for a campaign, mainly in stopping them meddling with the past. But what if Kammler and his acolytes used the Bell to escape the fall of Germany and arrived in......the future.
Not necessarily today; many of the "spy-fi" television series of the '60s and '70s⁶ featured Nazi holdouts, preserved brain of Hitler optional, scheming to create the Fourth Reich. Perfect for a UNIT-centric campaign, with-or-without the Doctor
Blend in Nazi groups in Norway (set up by Sporrenberg and staffed by people flown of of Germany at the end in captured Allied, or experimental German, aircraft flown by KG200⁷), Argentina (where many real and fictional Nazi survivor groups were based, convenient for the Antarctic too) or under the ice in Neuschwabenland and there's a whole campaign of cleaning up Nazis.

• Assuming of course that, unlike the British, they Germans didn't discover a portal to an ancient alien base on the moon and establish a settlement there.
  

Perhaps Kammler teams up with fellow Nazi Karl von Gelb and only a group of teenagers, including an ancestor of Zoe Herriot, can stop their sinister plot?


Or their arrival could be in the further future, perhaps the PCs encounter a group of time displaced Nazis meddling in Terran politics in the aftermath of the Dalek Invasion? Or did Magnus Greel and the rest of the Supreme Alliance have some ideological assistance?


Then again maybe the Bell arrived in the past. What happens next depend on the resources available and just when and where it arrived. Victorian London is an excellent possibility⁸ where they could either establish or take over an existing secret society seeking world domination, setting them in a complicated, multi-sided secret war with the Napoleon of Crime and his organisation, Vadame Vastra and her allies, the Mayor of Trap Street and her refugees, the survivors of the Black Dragon Tong (led by the offspring of Li H'sen Chang), Torchwood, Messrs Jago and Litefoot (who've still got the Time Cabinet) and the Hourglass Club.

Now there's a campaign.

Depending on the number of people, their motivations (fanatical Nazis or people glad not be facing Russian troops), weapons (mundane WW2 gear or 'specials'), other resources (looted gold and artworks) a GM can tune the difficult of stopping their nefarious plans.


Comments? Ideas? Suggestions?



1. I've mentioned the Glocke before.

2. Except for Kammler and his disappearance, that is an unsolved mystery.

3. If such distortions persisted then any area where the Bell was used could be subject to very odd effects, including time ghosts, localised time loops et cetera, giving more interesting possibilities.

4. Which ties the Bell in to the Paternoster Investigations background neatly.

5. Perhaps the Odin was an earlier implementation of the technology? After it disappeared the Kriegsmarine were forced to hard over their recovered toys to the SS and the Bell was devised.

6. The Man from UNCLE, The (New) Avengers, The Tomorrow People, Freewheelers, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea et cetera.

7. Who were used to odd missions, non-standard aircraft, secret bases and had their own cadre of parachute trained commandos.

8. The Kontron crystals became trapped in temporal resonance with their earlier selves....

[grinch]

I do rather like the idea of using the Bell as a means of introducing a set of recurring antagonists. Say a group of highly trained Nazis who have found themselves displaced in the Time Vortex due to unprotected exposure to the Bell and who periodically find themselves arriving in miscellaneous time periods.

You could have them pop up across the centuries facing off against all sorts of recognisable groups such as Jago and Litefoot, Counter Measures, Torchwood, PROBE and then finally UNIT.

In any case, they’d be the perfect antagonist for the similarly temporally displaced Adam Eterno or Doug and Tony.

[Catsmate]

Aug 14, 2022 10:32:33 GMT grinch said:

I do rather like the idea of using the Bell as a means of introducing a set of recurring antagonists. Say a group of highly trained Nazis who have found themselves displaced in the Time Vortex due to unprotected exposure to the Bell and who periodically find themselves arriving in miscellaneous time periods.

You could have them pop up across the centuries facing off against all sorts of recognisable groups such as Jago and Litefoot, Counter Measures, Torchwood, PROBE and then finally UNIT.

In any case, they’d be the perfect antagonist for the similarly temporally displaced Adam Eterno or Doug and Tony.

Excellent idea there. Wasn't there a comic with a vaguely similar plot? I can't find any details but I remember something along those lines.

[grinch]

Aug 14, 2022 10:58:51 GMT Catsmate said:

Aug 14, 2022 10:32:33 GMT grinch said:

I do rather like the idea of using the Bell as a means of introducing a set of recurring antagonists. Say a group of highly trained Nazis who have found themselves displaced in the Time Vortex due to unprotected exposure to the Bell and who periodically find themselves arriving in miscellaneous time periods.

You could have them pop up across the centuries facing off against all sorts of recognisable groups such as Jago and Litefoot, Counter Measures, Torchwood, PROBE and then finally UNIT.

In any case, they’d be the perfect antagonist for the similarly temporally displaced Adam Eterno or Doug and Tony.

Excellent idea there. Wasn't there a comic with a vaguely similar plot? I can't find any details but I remember something along those lines.

There probably is, but nothing is immediately springing to mind. I know there was a SCP Foundation entry on such an idea and I believe funnily enough ‘Commando’ of all publications did an issue about the Bell. 

Of course, the matter of temporally displaced Nazi agents to the one side for one moment it does make me wonder what happened to the Bell within the Whoniverse? In some private collection somewhere, perhaps? 

[soultaker666212]

Aug 14, 2022 11:53:57 GMT grinch said:

Aug 14, 2022 10:58:51 GMT Catsmate said:

Excellent idea there. Wasn't there a comic with a vaguely similar plot? I can't find any details but I remember something along those lines.

There probably is, but nothing is immediately springing to mind. I know there was a SCP Foundation entry on such an idea and I believe funnily enough ‘Commando’ of all publications did an issue about the Bell. 

Of course, the matter of temporally displaced Nazi agents to the one side for one moment it does make me wonder what happened to the Bell within the Whoniverse? In some private collection somewhere, perhaps? 

Reminds me of an Idea I had for a Time Loop Mystery which surrounded a 1953 English village who were celebrating with a street party for the Queen's coronation, yet everyone within the village (and stately home nearby) are all in the time loop. The Time Loop being set up by The Vicar, a Time Lord who chose this place as away to to escape the horrors of the The Last Great Time War and set up this loop to keep himself hidden. The Loop is controlled by the Church Bell which is a Gallifreyan artefact that can create time loops (for how long is up to the GM) and that it is controlled by hidden technology disguised as the altar, his TARDIS being the confession booth. Just thought id bring this idea up on the topic of bells. 

[grinch]

Aug 14, 2022 12:42:29 GMT soultaker666212 said:

Aug 14, 2022 11:53:57 GMT grinch said:

There probably is, but nothing is immediately springing to mind. I know there was a SCP Foundation entry on such an idea and I believe funnily enough ‘Commando’ of all publications did an issue about the Bell. 

Of course, the matter of temporally displaced Nazi agents to the one side for one moment it does make me wonder what happened to the Bell within the Whoniverse? In some private collection somewhere, perhaps? 

Reminds me of an Idea I had for a Time Loop Mystery which surrounded a 1953 English village who were celebrating with a street party for the Queen's coronation, yet everyone within the village (and stately home nearby) are all in the time loop. The Time Loop being set up by The Vicar, a Time Lord who chose this place as away to to escape the horrors of the The Last Great Time War and set up this loop to keep himself hidden. The Loop is controlled by the Church Bell which is a Gallifreyan artefact that can create time loops (for how long is up to the GM) and that it is controlled by hidden technology disguised as the altar, his TARDIS being the confession booth. Just thought id bring this idea up on the topic of bells. 

Reminds me a lot of the excellent Big Finish audio “No More Lies” and the S&S story “Perfect Day” 

A desperate man trying to preserve one perfect day as long as possible and by any means necessary.

[Catsmate]

Aug 14, 2022 11:53:57 GMT grinch said:

Aug 14, 2022 10:58:51 GMT Catsmate said:

Excellent idea there. Wasn't there a comic with a vaguely similar plot? I can't find any details but I remember something along those lines.

There probably is, but nothing is immediately springing to mind. I know there was a SCP Foundation entry on such an idea and I believe funnily enough ‘Commando’ of all publications did an issue about the Bell. 

Of course, the matter of temporally displaced Nazi agents to the one side for one moment it does make me wonder what happened to the Bell within the Whoniverse? In some private collection somewhere, perhaps? 

Black Archive perhaps? Or a test facility.

[Catsmate]

Aug 14, 2022 13:41:01 GMT grinch said:

Aug 14, 2022 12:42:29 GMT soultaker666212 said:

Reminds me of an Idea I had for a Time Loop Mystery which surrounded a 1953 English village who were celebrating with a street party for the Queen's coronation, yet everyone within the village (and stately home nearby) are all in the time loop. The Time Loop being set up by The Vicar, a Time Lord who chose this place as away to to escape the horrors of the The Last Great Time War and set up this loop to keep himself hidden. The Loop is controlled by the Church Bell which is a Gallifreyan artefact that can create time loops (for how long is up to the GM) and that it is controlled by hidden technology disguised as the altar, his TARDIS being the confession booth. Just thought id bring this idea up on the topic of bells. 

Reminds me a lot of the excellent Big Finish audio “No More Lies” and the S&S story “Perfect Day” 

A desperate man trying to preserve one perfect day as long as possible and by any means necessary.

One of Kim Newman's Diogenes Club stories has a similar premise.

ETA: it's 'The End of the Pier Show'.link

And the graphic novel I mentioned is Chronos Commandos.

[grinch]

Aug 14, 2022 15:41:20 GMT Catsmate said:

Aug 14, 2022 11:53:57 GMT grinch said:

There probably is, but nothing is immediately springing to mind. I know there was a SCP Foundation entry on such an idea and I believe funnily enough ‘Commando’ of all publications did an issue about the Bell. 

Of course, the matter of temporally displaced Nazi agents to the one side for one moment it does make me wonder what happened to the Bell within the Whoniverse? In some private collection somewhere, perhaps? 

Black Archive perhaps? Or a test facility.

The Americans may have repurposed it in the aftermath of the War. They may have even recruited a lot of ex Nazis during “Operation Paperclip” to work on or duplicate it. With little to no success. 

[Catsmate]

Oct 16, 2022 14:56:54 GMT grinch said:

Aug 14, 2022 15:41:20 GMT Catsmate said:

Black Archive perhaps? Or a test facility.

The Americans may have repurposed it in the aftermath of the War. They may have even recruited a lot of ex Nazis during “Operation Paperclip” to work on or duplicate it. With little to no success. 

Unless those Nazis used the project to acquire resources for, and otherwise support and conceal, the network of Nazi survivors; in Antarctica¹, a facility dug into a suitable Bavarian mountain², a lunar crater³, Brazil/Argentina/South America⁴ and the mysterious Scottish island of St. Dorca⁵.





1. Too many stories, rumours and conspiracy theories to list. Try here to start.

2. An episode of Department S I believe

3. The Antarctic Space Nazi trope.

4. Too many stories to list. Including Silver Nemesis.

5. The Eagle's Nest from the New Avengers

[grinch]

I also rather like the idea that the reason the Nazis and other interested parties were unable to recreate the Bell was because in an unseen adventure, a group of PCs or even the Doctor reprogrammed the Bell to be constantly locked in a time loop of itself exploding, reassembling and then so on and so forth...

Prevented the Nazis (outside of a certain Dr Klein) from gaining access to time travel technology but also meant the Nazi Commandos stranded in the Time Vortex could never be rescued.

[Catsmate]

Oct 23, 2022 19:10:41 GMT grinch said:

I also rather like the idea that the reason the Nazis and other interested parties were unable to recreate the Bell was because in an unseen adventure, a group of PCs or even the Doctor reprogrammed the Bell to be constantly locked in a time loop of itself exploding, reassembling and then so on and so forth...

Prevented the Nazis (outside of a certain Dr Klein) from gaining access to time travel technology but also meant the Nazi Commandos stranded in the Time Vortex could never be rescued.

I like that!
Though my first thought is a layered predestination paradox plot, with the PCs encountering the Bell, breaking the time loop, encountering the Nazis, finding that they would create the loop, having to fix matters and them create the loop in the first place....
All while not tangling the fabric of reality too badly.

[grinch]

Oct 23, 2022 20:41:48 GMT Catsmate said:

Oct 23, 2022 19:10:41 GMT grinch said:

I also rather like the idea that the reason the Nazis and other interested parties were unable to recreate the Bell was because in an unseen adventure, a group of PCs or even the Doctor reprogrammed the Bell to be constantly locked in a time loop of itself exploding, reassembling and then so on and so forth...

Prevented the Nazis (outside of a certain Dr Klein) from gaining access to time travel technology but also meant the Nazi Commandos stranded in the Time Vortex could never be rescued.

I like that!
Though my first thought is a layered predestination paradox plot, with the PCs encountering the Bell, breaking the time loop, encountering the Nazis, finding that they would create the loop, having to fix matters and them create the loop in the first place....
All while not tangling the fabric of reality too badly.

....But just enough to prevent the Bell from ever being accessed or recreated. 

[Catsmate]

Oct 24, 2022 19:04:41 GMT grinch said:

Oct 23, 2022 20:41:48 GMT Catsmate said:

I like that!
Though my first thought is a layered predestination paradox plot, with the PCs encountering the Bell, breaking the time loop, encountering the Nazis, finding that they would create the loop, having to fix matters and them create the loop in the first place....
All while not tangling the fabric of reality too badly.

....But just enough to prevent the Bell from ever being accessed or recreated. 

Exactly.
Unless a new plot device is needed.....